Sarah Manguso, in the NY Times: "All artifacts begin as useful objects, then spend an unforeseeable amount of time as clutter before becoming valuable again, as artifacts. So — what is a writer to keep?"

Rachel Toor, in the NY Times: "The truth is, most essays are typical. Many are boring. Some are just plain bad. But occasionally one will make an admissions officer tear down the hallway to find a colleague to whom she can say, 'You have to read what this Math Olympiad girl said about "Hamlet."' Your goal is to write an essay that makes someone fall in love with you."

Yet another take on writing pedagogy, from Dana Goldstein in the NY Times: "There is virulent debate about what approach is best. So-called process writing ... emphasizes activities like brainstorming, freewriting, journaling about one’s personal experiences and peer-to-peer revision. Adherents worry that focusing too much on grammar or citing sources will stifle the writerly voice and prevent children from falling in love with writing as an activity.... Dr. Hochman’s strategy is radically different: a return to the basics of sentence construction, from combining fragments to fixing punctuation errors to learning how to deploy the powerful conjunctive adverbs that are common in academic writing but uncommon in speech, words like 'therefore' and 'nevertheless.'"

Wise words from Debra Fileta: "If you’re getting married with your own happiness as your main goal, you will be disappointed in a severe way. Marriage is not about your happiness, it’s not even about you. It’s about love—which is something we choose to give time and time again. It’s about sacrifice, serving, giving, forgiving—and then doing it all over again."

Richard Reeves, in the NY Times: "The rhetoric of 'We are the 99 percent' has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy six-figure incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality."

Cool Kickstarter project: "Timebound is an app for learning about the past in an easy and exciting way. It allows you to follow important historical events hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute. You can join the Titanic on her maiden voyage, witness the hunt for Jack the Ripper, see the first landing on the Moon, experience the first Woodstock festival, and dozens of other thrilling stories."

Mehmet Duran: "Automated tools can be a useful and cheap way of helping you make a service more accessible. They are quick to run and provide immediate feedback. They can be run across lots of pages. Some can be integrated into the build process, so they can identify issues almost as soon as they are created. But while it can certainly be helpful to run an automated testing tool on a service, it’s important that teams don’t rely on them too heavily. No tool will be able to pick up every accessibility barrier on a website. So just because a tool hasn’t picked up any accessibility issues on a website, doesn’t mean those issues don’t exist."

Anastasia Salter, on ProfHacker: "Earlier this month, a team of researchers from Brigham Young University and University of Maryland, led by Derek Hansen and Kari Kraus, launched a new free educational game The Tessera: Ghostly Tracks. Funded in part by the NSF, the game is a beautiful way to explore principles of computational thinking in a multiplayer, narrative-driven setting while unraveling a ghost story."

Phil Windley: "This post describes a proof of concept for a personal learning system called a student profile. The student profile gives students control over their personal information, including learning activities, and demonstrates how other parties can trust learning records kept in the student profile and shared by the student. This is a critical factor in creating personal learning environments that support life-long learning and give the university greater flexibility in system architecture."

Awesome news: "As of today, all images of public-domain works in The Met collection are available under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). So whether you're an artist or a designer, an educator or a student, a professional or a hobbyist, you now have more than 375,000 images of artworks from our collection to use, share, and remix—without restriction."

Audrey Watters: "I’m concerned, in no small part, because students are often unaware of the amount of data that schools and the software companies they contract with know about them. I’m concerned because students are compelled to use software in educational settings. You can’t opt out of the learning management system. You can’t opt out of the student information system. You can’t opt out of required digital textbooks or digital assignments or digital assessments. You can’t opt out of the billing system or the financial aid system. You can’t opt of having your cafeteria purchases, Internet usage, dorm room access, fitness center habits tracked. Your data as a student is scattered across multiple applications and multiple databases, most of which I’d wager are not owned or managed by the school itself but rather outsourced to a third-party provider."

Helpful tutorial by Amanda Visconti: "This lesson is for you if you’d like an entirely free, easy-to-maintain, preservation-friendly, secure website over which you have full control, such as a scholarly blog, project website, or online portfolio. At the end of this lesson, you’ll have a basic live website where you can publish content that other people can visit ... and you’ll also have some resources to explore if you want to further customize the site."

James Williamson and Jim Phillips, in EDCAUSE Review: "Suppliers make it easy for users to sign up and use a tool, and when the tool is offered for free, users bypass the negotiation and purchasing processes between universities and their suppliers. Unconstrained by campus agreements, these suppliers gain new access to data and intellectual property — access that primarily benefits those who have commercial interests for tapping into and accumulating university, faculty, and student data."

Emily Schweiss: "As humans, we don’t typically enjoy selling ourselves. It feels awkward, which makes creating a professional portfolio a daunting task. It’s hard to know where to begin, what to focus on, and how it should look. Don’t worry, we’ve got your back."

Jill Leafstedt and Michelle Pacansky-Brock, in EdSurge: "In recent years, colleges and universities have recognized this and begun merging academic technology and faculty development. They’re adding the word 'innovation' to the titles of centers for teaching and learning and the individuals who lead them. These leaders are not only getting new titles—their backgrounds are also changing. Today, edtech leaders are much more likely to be teachers with technology expertise rather than technologists. But it takes more than employing a new structure, changing the skillsets of a team or implementing a catchy title to make change happen, especially in higher education."

Liz Danzico: "While many of us have at least one frustrating IKEA assembly story, what the process does accomplish merits astonishment. Each tool and part is enumerated. Each step is isolated and requires a kind of mindfulness to do one thing at a time. Right and wrong are charmingly illustrated with line-drawn figures. And all of this — whether for a 4- or a 400-part piece — is done without a single letter of type. In this way, good and affordable design is easily accessible to speakers of any language, any level, any skill. The instructions serve all equally."

Great essay by Mike Caulfield on the limits of heuristic-based information literacy frameworks: "What is the digital literacy I want? I want something that is actually digital, something that deals with the particular affordances of the web, and gives students a knowledge of how to use specific web tools and techniques. I want something that recognizes that domain knowledge is crucial to literacy, something that puts an end to helicopter-dropping students into broadly different domains. I want a literacy that at least considers the possibility that students in an American democracy should know what the Center for American Progress and Cato are, a literacy that considers that we might teach these things directly, rather than expecting them to RADCAB their way to it on an individual basis. It might also make sense (crazy, I know!) that students understand the various ideologies and internet cultures that underlie a lot of what they see online, rather than fumbling their way toward it individually."

"It really lies in the simple act of reading tons of poetry. And I mean not just stuff you find in magazines but if you really want to be trained in poetry you need to read Milton — you need to read Paradise Lost. You need to read Wordsworth — you need to read Wordsworth's 'Prelude.' That's if you want to take it seriously. If you don't want to take it seriously, you can just get a 79-cent pen and express yourself."

Jason Kottke points to a talk by Alan Watts, in which Watts shares a parable about a wise farmer who doesn't jump to conclusions: "The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune. Or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune."

"We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON."

Someday I'll attempt this: "With only two main ingredients, butter and potatoes, pommes Anna is a minimalist triumph of French technique. It is also one of the more challenging potato dishes to prepare and a true glory to any cook who makes it correctly."

Molly Worthen, in the NY Times: "I suspect that most of the time, students who call faculty members by their first names and send slangy messages are not seeking a more casual rapport. They just don’t know they should do otherwise — no one has bothered to explain it to them. Explaining the rules of professional interaction is not an act of condescension; it’s the first step in treating students like adults."

Dru Johnston: "If I hadn’t built that time machine and gone back to kill Hitler, you’d all be saying to yourselves, 'Man, I wish I had a time machine so I could kill Hitler.' In fact, growing up that was such a common sentiment it never dawned on me no one would know who he was when I returned. So I took out this ad in the Times to help explain why everyone owes me. I’m not looking to be a hero. But a thank-you would be nice."

Michael Beirut, in Design Observer: "It isn’t pleasant to have talk show hosts making fun of your work on national television. And there was something all so gleefully vicious about it. It was just some simple geometric shapes and a couple of primary colors, yet it seemed to drive so many people crazy."

Laura Pappano covers the rise of "comptutational thinking" on university campuses in the NY Times. This train is probably moving too fast to be stopped, but let's remember: "There is no reliable research showing that computing makes one more creative or more able to problem-solve."

Slack's Anna Pickard: "As we’ve grown, the number of mentions has exploded from a couple dozen to hundreds (sometimes thousands) every day. But we’ve still tried to maintain the same tone, whoever is tweeting. It’s the place that the Slack voice is the most playful, but it’s also high pressure — which makes it a tricky one to scale."

Jason Snell: " To be clear—you could use your iPhone’s microphone or a set of EarPods and record a podcast with no extra investment, and you don’t need to spend a dime to get started. GarageBand is free with every Mac, Audacity is free for everyone, and Ferrite is free on iOS with a couple cheap in-app purchases for extra features. But if you do want to invest a little bit in a better microphone, where should you put that cash? Here’s my recommendation for how you can get a great set-up for under $100."

Amelia Tait, in the New Statesman: "We have become very used to the idea that you can find anything on the internet, yet what do we accept as “proof”? Do we need pictures, videos, and articles, or is the fact that hundreds of others share our memory enough?"

New app from Rogue Amoeba: "From SoundSource’s menu bar icon, you can instantly configure the audio devices your Mac uses for Input, Output and Sound Effects. In seconds, you can adjust the volume for each of your audio devices or switch between connected devices. SoundSource can also enable the soft play-thru of audio from input devices. Use the Play-Thru window to monitor any connected input, such as a microphone, right through your headphones or other output."

Lori Deschene: "Sure, there are lots of things we can’t control: businesses may fold, stocks may plummet, relationships may end—the list is infinite, really. But wouldn’t we be far more effective if we focused on all things we can control instead; if we stopped worrying about the indefinite and started benefiting from the guaranteed?"

"In the coming weeks, months and years, from this virtual lectern, we will celebrate oratory old and new, endeavouring not just to whoop with delight at the speeches that we already know and admire but also to shine a light on those speeches which, despite their brilliance, are often ignored."

Joseph B. Treaster, in the NY Times: "Health care companies and sports teams have been working with predictive analytics for years. But the approach is in its early stages on campuses. A handful of companies have sprung up in the last few years, working with perhaps 200 universities. They identify trends in the data and create computer programs that monitor student progress and alert advisers when students go off historically successful pathways."

Oliver Burkeman, in the Guardian: "The allure of the doctrine of time management is that, one day, everything might finally be under control. Yet work in the modern economy is notable for its limitlessness. And if the stream of incoming emails is endless, Inbox Zero can never bring liberation: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity — you’re just rolling it slightly faster."

Mark W. Travis: "Maybe the creative urge we feel is meant primarily to feed our selves, nourish ourselves, take care of, comfort and protect ourselves. We think we tell stories for others, to inform or entertain. But what if we are initially doing this for ourselves? What if our storytelling is such an essential tool to keep the human psyche in balance that it has become as important as food, air and sleep?"

Tim Herrera, in the NY Times: "You’ve probably thought about what will happen to your finances, your possessions and maybe even your real estate when you die. But what about your Facebook account? Or your hard-drive backups?"

Good advice from Paul T. Corrigan: "In a real sense, however, we don’t write your letters. You do. You write your own letters by the reputation and relationships you build during your years in college. When your professors sit down to type out a recommendation on official letterhead, we just do our best to record in words what you’ve already written with your actions."

Gary Taubes, in Aeon: "With the epidemics of obesity and diabetes having long ago passed into crisis level, isn’t it time we finally considered seriously the possibility that our prescriptions and approaches to prevention and treatment of these diseases are simply wrong, based on incorrect paradigms and a century of misguided science?"

Jenny Odell looks back at the early "how to" videos for email and the internet: "What makes the highway metaphor sound so strange now is that it implies the traversing of space and the passing of time. It’s another version of the old 'series of tubes' idea, before the internet began to feel like a stifling sea of instantaneity."

Laura Elizabeth, in Smashing Magazine: "I’ve never been a fan of color theory. I think it’s because I’ve always been a bit hopeless at it.... That’s why, in this article, you won’t see a single color wheel. Instead I’m going to show you a simple color workflow that you can use in your next web project."

Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchherr make a bold argument: "It may be time to reassess scholars’ performance. For tenure and promotion considerations, scholars’ impacts on policy formulation and public debates should also be assessed. These publications often showcase the practical relevance and potential application of the research results to solve real world problems."

"Since 1998, Software Carpentry has been teaching researchers in science, engineering, medicine, and related disciplines the computing skills they need to get more done in less time and with less pain."

Nice interview with Carlos Evia on the Content Wrangler: “Years ago, I started coding websites with HTML and then structuring documentation with XML, but Markdown allows me to use plain text for similar purposes. My Markdown files can become HTML and XML deliverables with one or two lines of commands or a few keystrokes.”

Basic, but important, strategies from Tim O'Reilly. For instance: "Are there multiple independent accounts of the same story? This is a technique that was long used by human reporters in the days when truth was central to the news. A story, however juicy, would never be reported on the evidence of a single source."

Fantastic resource: "The National Park Service publishes tons of great free maps; I’ve collected them all for you here. On this site you can download PDF and image files of any U.S. national park map."

Great suggestions from Miriam Posner designed to solve a perpetual problem with in-class workshops: "The instructor issues directions while students try to keep up at each step. Some students accomplish each step quickly, but some students take a little longer to find the right menu item or remember where they’ve saved a file. No matter how often you tell students to please interrupt or raise a hand if they need help, most students won’t do this. They don’t want to slow everyone else down with what they’re sure is a stupid question. Eventually, these students stop trying to follow along, and the workshop becomes, in their minds, further evidence that they’re not cut out for this."

Laura Gogia: "The misuse of methods is rampant and labels are not to be blindly trusted. Research questions tell a story oftentimes bigger than the article itself. Data collection and analytic tools can be used in different ways by different research traditions to produce very different outcomes. Philosophy shapes everything."

Michael Lopp on the importance (and perils) of staff meetings: "I find that 1:1s beat staff meetings in two important categories: trust building and quality of signal. But, there are ongoing compounding benefits to a regular well-run staff meeting."

Helpful tips from Jason Snell: "The problem is that the pop-up appeared every time my sister opened Safari, and it proved impossible to dismiss the pop-up and then access Safari settings before the pop-up reappeared. Her question for me was simple: How do I get access to Safari back and make sure this doesn’t happen again? It took a couple hours of trying to get the answer. If you or a family member of yours gets infected by this same approach, maybe I can save you some time and heartache."

Andy Baio makes the case for old-school blogging: "Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web."

Interesting new project from On Being's Krista Tippett: "How do we speak the questions we don’t know how to ask each other? How to engage our neighbors who have become strangers? Can we do that even while we continue to hold passionate disagreements on deep convictions? How is technology playing into all this, and how can we shape it to human purposes?"

"[W]here to start with woodworking? What machines do you need? My suggestion is that you should start by doing some woodworking, and only after that start buying big equipment." (It's possible that I love the idea of getting into woodworking more than I could ever love actually doing woodworking.)

Cal Newport, an author with no social media presence, writing in the NY Times: "The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you’re serious about creating things that matter."